Easton High grad Ian Bell stars in AMC's 'Making of the Mob'

LAWRENCE FRENCH / AMC, CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

Ian Bell as Meyer Lansky (left), John Stewart Jr. as Bugsy Siegel, Rich Graff as Lucky Luciano, Anthony DiCarlo as Frank Costello and Craig Rivela as Vito Genovese in 'The Making of The Mob: New York,' which will premiere at 10 p.m. June 15 on AMC. It will be narrated by Emmy winning actor Ray Liotta.

Ian Bell as Meyer Lansky (left), John Stewart Jr. as Bugsy Siegel, Rich Graff as Lucky Luciano, Anthony DiCarlo as Frank Costello and Craig Rivela as Vito Genovese in 'The Making of The Mob: New York,' which will premiere at 10 p.m. June 15 on AMC. It will be narrated by Emmy winning actor Ray Liotta. (LAWRENCE FRENCH / AMC, CONTRIBUTED PHOTO)

William GordonOf The Morning Call

Easton High grad Ian Bell stars as gangster Meyer Lansky in the new AMC eight-part mini-series.

When actor Ian Bell was a 17-year-old student at Easton Area High School in 2001, he played a former FBI double agent who attempts to infiltrate the mafia in a movie he made with two friends. It was called "For the Family."

Now Bell, 31, in the biggest role of his lifetime, is playing in another mafia movie. Bell stars as notorious gangster Meyer Lansky in the new AMC eight-part mini-series "The Making of The Mob: New York." The series takes you back to America in the early 1900s, when men wore suits daily and Model T Fords roamed the streets.

The series tells the story of the rise of Charles "Lucky" Luciano and his crew as the heads of the mafia in New York. Narrated by Emmy Award-winning actor Ray Liotta, "Making of The Mob" will premiere at 10 p.m. Monday night and continue Mondays through Aug. 3.

Bell chuckles at the memory of making "For the Family."

"We didn't know what the hell we were doing," he says, laughing. "And we couldn't act at all. We were terrible. But it was fun, you know."

Since then, Bell's work as an actor has consisted mainly of a few independent films and some Off-Off-Broadway plays. He lives in Brooklyn and also works as a carpenter on set design.

He says that while he is interested in all types of stories, there is something uniquely American about mafia stories. Although the series shows the vicious dealings of the mob and criminal underworld, he says "Making of the Mob: New York" is also a story about five men trying to make it in America.

"They were building an organization and that was kind of how we treated the story," Bell says. "It was these five guys building something together."

Because most of these mobsters came to America with nearly nothing, Bell says this is also a story about people fighting for a better life.

"There's something uniquely kind of American and uniquely romantic about mafia stories, about guys who are willing to go to any lengths and work in kind of a legal gray area, that is definitely specifically interesting in a certain way," he says.

Meyer Lansky, was a Polish-Jewish-American gangster who was born in modern-day Belarus in 1902 and grew up in the Lower East Side of New York City after his parents immigrated to the U.S in 1911. He made most of his money through bootlegging and, after Prohibition, gambling.

Lansky was a behind-the-scenes mobster. Because of his brilliance in mathematics, he managed most of the mob's money, earning him the title the "Mob's Accountant." "He wasn't the guy pulling the trigger," Bell says.

It was intimidating at first to play such a legendary figure as Lansky, Bell says, since many have their own ideas about the way Lansky acted.

"The fear is a good thing," he says. "The fear can definitely be like a good motivating factor."

"It's intimidating," Bell adds. "But you just hope that you absorbed enough of this person and that you know what you're doing enough to do the job. And then when you get there and you're actually filming scenes you have to forget about all that stuff."

Rather than playing Lansky as a caricature of a mobster, Bell dove deeper and used his research to create a realistic portrayal of the man.

"Humans aren't simple," Bell says. "We're complex."

Not only was Lansky a gangster, but he also was a mathematical genius, an immigrant and, by some accounts, a family man. In an interview with the Tampa Bay Times from 2014, his daughter, Sandra Lansky, says she remembers her father and his friends, such as "Bugsy" Siegel and "Lucky" Luciano, as family members. His grandson, Meyer Lansky II, will be interviewed in the AMC mini-series, which is a mix of scripted scenes, archival footage and interviews.

Lansky's story as an immigrant trying to create a better life for himself in America, Bell says, is similar to Bell's grandfather, Sergio Sayago. He immigrated from Venezuela to New York City with his mother when he was 6 years old in the 1920s, fought in World War II and went to Lafayette College on the GI Bill.

"[It's] that classic American story of dreaming for a better life and coming to this country and making it happen," Bell says. "That is really I think the thing that I can latch on to in these guys' story, you know, in Meyer's story."

Bell is thankful for his own upbringing as a middle-class resident of the Easton area. He says not quite sure why he got into acting. He was more focused on athletics in high school, Bell did appear in a few of the high school musicals. He says he became interested in human behavior, which drove his interest in pursuing acting as a career.

His mother is an English teacher, so Bell says he began reading from a young age. Support from his family, he says, played a huge part in allowing him to pursue a career as an actor. He was never told he couldn't do something.

"Luckily my family are dreamers like I am, so I was real lucky in that respect," Bell says.

Even when Bell was making "In the Family" with his friends, his family was supportive, buying him the equipment he needed to film the movie.

"Goodfellas," which Bell says is one of his favorite mafia movies, will air before the show's premiere. It stars Liotta, the series narrator.

Liotta says in a news release, "Narrating 'The Making of The Mob: New York' is a thrill for me because I'm fascinated, like many, by the rich, untold history of these men and their strong ties to each other."